In his Regent College lectures commentator Rex Murphy will argue that environmentalism is an ersatz religion and that political correctness, with its "heavy-handed corrections," amounts to a form of orthodoxy.

The ferocious Canadian commentator Rex Murphy will take on the environmental movement, the politically correct and secularists in his three-part lecture series this week for Regent College, the evangelical graduate school on the University of B.C. campus.

UPDATE: March 2013: Rex Murphy returned to Regent to do a show for Cross-Country Check-up on the question: “Does religion have a place in public life?” The podcast can be found here.

Known for his breathtaking articulateness, and for taking no prisoners in his attacks on liberals of all stripes, Murphy will deliver the annual Laing lectures on Thursday evening and Friday noon and evening at First Baptist Church, 969 Burrard St., Vancouver.

Regent College theologian John Stackhouse and Preston Manning, founder of the Reform Party and the Alliance Party, will respond to Murphy, whose witty malignings of public figures are featured regularly in The National Post and on CBC radio and television.

Over the course of three lectures, Mr. Murphy will offer an account of how the Christian understanding of life was pushed back, was attacked by, and in some cases surrendered itself to purely secular imperatives.

He will remark on the great voids left by this retreat, and how in some cases secular understandings, such as the prevailing socio-political thought of many Western nations, have occupied the empty terrain and even taken on the character once owned only by religious belief—but without its philosophical foundations.

Finally, Mr. Murphy will examine two cases that illustrate this perspective: the advance of environmentalism as an ersatz-religion, and the phenomenon of political correctness, and its heavy-handed corrections, which amounts to another form of orthodoxy.

Will Rex Murphy’s lectures note the difference between “secularism” (which can become an ideology) and the process of “secularization?” It’s a crucial distinction made by Canada’s less-combative thinker, Charles Taylor (who also once delivered lectures at Regent), as well as others.

A growing collection of philosophers and theologians, including Canada’s Charles Taylor, author of A Secular Age, maintain we have to move beyond understanding secularization merely as a process of “subtraction,” “loss” and “disenchantment.”

Canada’s Charles Taylor, author of A Secular Age, argues that secularization is largely positive – as long as it leaves open a “window on the transcendent.”

Such thinkers are re-defining secularization – as a social development by which religion loses its state-sanctioned authority and moral absolutism (as the Catholic Church once functioned in Europe and Quebec). Secularization is creating societies in which religion is treated as one option among many….

One of the most welcome and quoted new books on the subject is Taylor’s A Secular Age, an 896-page opus that argues that secularization has been largely positive – as long as it leaves open a “window on the transcendent.”

The spiritual and religious impulse in humans will never die, says Taylor. Even if religion doesn’t dominate a society, as it once unfortunately did in Europe and elsewhere, people will always seek the transcendent; something ultimate, larger than themselves.

The great sociologist of religion, Robert Bellah, author of Habits of the Heart, says what is needed most now is new forms of religion that work in a secular age, where they are subject to analysis and don’t rely on political endorsement….

We can partly thank the Enlightenment for the rise of secularism, with the era’s emphasis on freethinking, rationality and science. But many thinkers, including 19th-century sociologist Max Weber, also credit the advance of secularism to Protestantism.

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